The $692 million CityTime scandal—arguably the biggest boondoggle of Mayor Bloomberg's three terms, even if most New Yorkers greeted it with a shrug—is starting to wrap up. Today the city and the U.S. Attorney's office announced that Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the main contractor in the $600 million-plus project, will pay over $500 million to resolve a federal criminal investigation into its conduct. Meanwhile the criminal charges in the case continue.
SAIC has agreed to pay a restitution of $370 million along with a penalty of $130 million for its part in the scandal which the U.S. Attorney's office once called "an unprecedented fraud, which appears to have metastasized over time" and that was "epic in duration, magnitude, and scope." The company will also waive a $41 million bill the city owed. "SAIC failed to take actions that might have detected, disrupted or curtailed the charged conspiracies, allowing the city to be victimized repeatedly and systematically for more than seven years," the company admitted in its deferred prosecution agreement.
Initially the Bloomberg administration had been looking for restitution of $600 million for the bloated payroll project that was initially supposed to cost a mere $63 million. But considering the fact that CityTime now is doing what it was supposed to, the city is taking what it can get. We're just impressed things have turned around this fast. After all, just last May Bloomberg was telling us all that, regarding the project, "we actually did a pretty good job here, in retrospect."
